Philip Stevick

{221} There was something playful, no doubt, about the
circumstances during the wet summer in which Frankenstein
was bargained for and conceived, but there is also no doubt that
the book is as utterly serious in intent as it is utterly
serious in execution. If we speak of irony in connection with
Frankenstein, what we mean is the tendency of the novel
to organize itself around some fairly predictable quirks of
fate. We do not use the word irony of the verbal texture of the
book, because there is no feigning, no indiscretion, no
undercutting, no mocking of forms, no doubleness, no play. Other
novels that strike us as serious, those of Hardy for example,
will allow a small interlude to "relieve" the relentless
seriousness of the execution, a rustic or fool who momentarily
diverts us with his incomprehension of the unfolding tragedy.
There are no such episodes in Frankenstein, and the
movement of its action is as serious as its verbal texture.
Moreover, the import of the book, its significance as a cultural
event and as a continuing influence in the imaginations of so
many readers and other artists who have followed it, are all
deeply serious, complicated, awesome to contemplate, and not at
all ridiculous. Having said this once, I will find it necessary
to say it again. Because it does not stay said, in the face of a
fact more overwhelming than the seriousness of the book, namely
its capacity to provoke laughter.

Say "Frankenstein" to anybody (well, almost anybody) and he (or
she) laughs. What he (or she) laughs at, of course, are largely
the burlesque associations that have come to surround the idea
of the book. So many parodic possibilities have accumulated
around the Monster that these are what one thinks of first.
Films are made in parody of other Frankenstein films.
Nightclub comics remind us that the Monster had a bolt in his
neck and sutures on his forehead.

{222} Small children who have never seen the Boris Karloff film version asked
to "do Frankenstein," will walk, arms outstretched, legs stiff,
brow menacing, finally convulsed with laughter. If the laughter
were merely an impertinent and irrelevant association attaching
to a serious text, we could dismiss it as an unfortunate
accretion distorting a classic work, of interest to the social
historian and the collector of folk fads but not to the literary
critic. But, whether we think so or not, our laughter is rooted
in certain aspects of Mary Shelley's text. And it is the nature
of that problematic comedy, existing in a wholly serious work,
that I wish to define. For in defining it one discovers a clear
continuity between Mary Shelley's text and a class of works,
among them some of the greatest in all of prose fiction, that
also generate simultaneously mythic seriousness and
uncomfortable laughter. And in defining it one further finds
that the comedy can only be understood by defining the
experience both of reading Frankenstein, and books like
it, and of remembering Frankenstein, and books like
it.

One experiences the comic aspects of Frankenstein in
different ways according to one's distance from the book. Before
the fact, one tends to expect the book to be, in some respects,
funny. It seems likely that such an expectation is a
mid-twentieth-century phenomenon and that no reader before, say,
the nineteen-thirties had any such expectation. As one actually
reads the book, it seems rarely, perhaps never, funny; scarcely
anyone laughs at Frankenstein page by page. After the
fact, the book is often comic, as one remembers certain set
pieces, as one tries to retell them, or as one tries to
translate the action of the book into another form. The
amusement one feels, in fact, is directly proportionate to one's
distance from the reading. One remembers events as being amusing
that, in the reading, one did not find amusing at all; and the
less perfectly one remembers them, the more amusing they
become.

Perhaps the best way of keeping in mind the quality I am
beginning to define is to consider the peculiar contrasts that
Frankenstein contains -- of energy and torpor, movement
and rest, obsessive frenzy and virtually pathological
detachment. They are strange and amazing contrasts that bear
directly on the reader's response. But such contrasts are not
unique to Frankenstein. Odysseus, man of action,
trickster, archetypal hero, is caught, again and again, in
postures of immobility that are, at once, distressing for the
reader, deeply significant, highly charged with mythic power,
and, in {223} retrospect, in some perverse and eccentric sense,
amusing. Gulliver, man
mountain, puller of armadas and pisser on castles, is caught,
again and again, in postures of immobility that are likewise
distressing to the reader, significant, mythically powerful,
and, in retrospect, funny. In the twentieth century, Kafka
serves up appropriate parallels and analogues from the modern
imagination of the strange and haunting alternation between
willing to do, doing, and being unable to do. This is a rhythm
especially common to that class of works described below, a
class with Frankenstein at its center. For if one sees
Frankenstein, and one's responses to it, not as being
atypical and sui generis but centrally characteristic of
a very distinguished kind, then Frankenstein becomes both
more intelligible and more aesthetically defensible.

I

The event most loaded with value in Frankenstein, most
problematic in one's response to it, is, of course, the moment
of creation. Before the fact, one thinks of mad scientists with
bulging eyes, crackling and badly controlled electrical charges,
the table, the covering sheet, the monster, the uncertainty, the
blinking eyes, the attempt to rise. It is all rather baroque,
almost alchemical, in its
prescientific intricacy, its bubbling tubes, its smoking
retorts. The passage,
however, is very different from our imagination of it, both in
detail and tone.

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the
accomplishments of my toils. With an anxiety that almost
amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around
me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing
that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain
pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly
burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light,
I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed
hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.1

Nobody would be so arrogant as to say what response is
appropriate to that passage, but it is certainly not
laughter.

For one thing, Mary Shelley has no interest in scientific {224}
technique. She diverts our attention elsewhere, to the rain, the
time, the light, and the attendant emotions. We may find the
techniques of biological creation amusing, but we supply those
techniques; they are not in Mary Shelley's text. For another
thing, at the moment of creation the monster is not actually
rendered but only implied. We may find the image of the
patchwork monster amusing, but again it is we who supply the
image. We may also look for a participant, an assistant, someone
perverse enough to share in the experiment and able to register
for us his anticipation. But in the text, Frankenstein is alone
(and, as Judith Wilt argues above,
it is thematically crucial that he be alone).

One characteristic of the passage, however, not at all comic in
the reading, is amusing as we remember and reconstruct it in
reflection. Moreover, unlike those other associations which we
unfairly bring to the text, it is an aspect of the action that
is really in the text. Victor calls his creation a "lifeless
thing," an object. His phrase carries connotations of disdain,
which are, of course, not random and uncontrolled connotations
but are here, as at other points in the book, Victor's
consistent view of his masterpiece. Having made the creature,
Victor doesn't like it very well, indeed is repelled by it, a
response underlined by the "yellow eye" of the next sentence,
from which the conclusion follows that Victor Frankenstein,
overreacher, nineteenth-century Anglo-Germanic Faust, fallen angel, Ancient Mariner, autodidact,
player at God, modern Prometheus, is not very good
at his trade.

Consider the surrounding details. Rather than imparting life to
a plausible corpse, Frankenstein has assembled anatomical parts
so as to make a creature eight feet tall. No thought of
the social problems of an eight foot creature crosses his mind.
During the period of the experiment, he visibly disintegrates,
becoming obsessive and compulsive, moved by thoughts of the
creation of a new race grateful to him for its creation -- yet
he speaks of his work as horrible, filthy, and loathsome. As he
recounts this period, he lapses into lyricism on the passing
seasons (he is nearly two years at his work), interjects
platitudes and facile praises of domesticity, and finally has to
be reminded by his implied reader to keep to the subject. At
last he imparts life and sees, apparently for the very first
time, that the creature's skin does not fit its frame, that its
eyes are watery and its lips are black. He leaves the room for
his bedchamber, {225} where he paces the floor, distraught and
nearly delirious, while the creature rises from the table and
walks away. But Frankenstein sees one last glimpse of him; the
monster beckons and smiles but Frankenstein, immobilized, cannot
respond. Frankenstein, in short, is a failure, not in a grand
and tragic manner but in a manner closer to low comedy,
bumbling, inattentive, inept, and ineffectual. Yet he does not
seem so line by line, and it would take a large measure of
cynicism to read those pages with sustained laughter.

In works of any period there are passages that we laugh at in
which the implicit intention is comic but the execution is
serious, for example, those portions of Gulliver's Travels in
which Gulliver's comic opacity is played off against his flat
and uncomprehending style. (Gulliver's Travels, in fact,
strikingly parallels Frankenstein in several ways, with
its seriocomic juxtapositions of size and in its contrasts of
energy, motion, and potency with failure, confinement, and
stasis.) In works of any period there are also passages we laugh
at in which the implicit intention is serious but the execution
is comic: the banter of Lear's
fool. And there are, lastly, works we laugh at even though
both the intention and the execution are serious, such as the
poems in The Stuffed Owl. Mary Shelley's book has
affinities with all three of these modes. But, despite
affinities with other kinds of writing in which some kind of
radical disjunction occurs between elements of seriousness and
elements of the comic, Frankenstein, I would suggest,
occupies a peculiar kind of subgenre, characterized by
dream-like mechanisms and by much rather directly rendered
psychic material, and also by a tension so unsettling as to
confound our sense of how to feel about it. Understanding the
place of Frankenstein in such a subgenre does much to
explain the amazing diversity of its many reincarnations,
versions differing precisely in the degree to which they ask us
to take the narrative seriously. (It is not irrelevant in
thinking about that subgenre to recall that the two great bodies
of narrative materials which Freud used as means for describing
the contours of the unconscious were dreams and jokes, that he
was variously disturbed and intrigued by the fact that the two
bear remarkable formal and functional similarities to each
other.)

Paul Zweig describes the impotence of the characters in Walpole's Castle of
Otranto, "their inability to make anything happen at
all."
{226}

This failure, I would argue, is the principal theme of
Otranto. All of its human characters have a genius for
ineptitude. When decisive acts are called for, they lunge about
and make a mess of things. The children hurry enthusiastically
toward disaster like rabbits into a headlight. The fathers --
Manfred, the monk Jerome, Frederick the good knight -- are
bunglers. Hippolyte, the mother, is so desperately obedient that
she seems to call down her husband's abuse, and deserve it.2

Zweig takes very seriously the mythic power that seems to have
been set in motion by Walpole's strange and artless book. Yet as
he summarizes the characteristic action of the book, his diction
becomes, almost as if against his will, quite comic: "lunge
about and make a mess of things," "like rabbits into a
headlight," "bunglers," "desperately obedient."

Zweig's view of Otranto is not the conventional one; yet
it seems, both in its argument and its tone, irrefutable. And,
looked at with Zweig's eyes, Otranto is transformed into
an analogue of Frankenstein. Although both books are
artistically flawed, a direct response to their quality as
objects of finished art seems if not irrelevant at least
secondary. In both books a strange tension exists between their
psychic power (Walpole himself reported that Otranto
originated in a dream and that its early composition was rather
like automatic writing) and the nature of an action so
ineffectual and bumbling as to be comic at some remove from the
experience of reading.

Nineteenth-century American fiction offers many variants of that
basic narrative situation, works often with a strained or crude
or "operatic" quality about them, carrying a heavy freight of
psychic baggage, in which the action is easily reducible to
repeated frustrations and ritual failures, the tone at all
points utterly serious, the action in its outlines perversely
comic. Poe wrote such tales, as did Hawthorne. In The
American Notebooks Hawthorne's ideas for his fiction read
like pure prototypes of the comic impulse, waiting to be fleshed
out with solemn prose: "A person to be writing a tale, and to
find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the
characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events
occur; and a catastrophe occurs which he strives in vain to
avert. It might shadow forth his own fate -- he having made
himself one of the {227} personages."3 Melville's Bartleby the
Scrivener is perhaps the best known and most artistically
successful example; a desperate and depressing story of ritual
nihilism, in which Melville obviously invested large amounts of
his own anxieties and artistic motives, Bartleby is, for
all that, quite comic. (Try telling the story of Bartleby aloud
to anyone who does not know it.)

The supreme example, for the twentieth-century imagination, of
this narrative situation is the fiction of Kafka, in which humor
lies just beneath the surface of the flat, underplayed style and
the grim desperation of his narratives. Max Brod recalls:

When Kafka read aloud, this humor became particularly clear.
Thus, for example, we friends of his laughed quite immoderately
when he first let us hear the first chapter of The
Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there were
moments when he couldn't read any further. Astonishing enough
when you think of the fearful earnestness of this chapter. But
that is how it was.4

The Metamorphosis, more concentrated than The
Trial, is, as more than one commentator has observed, at
once harrowing, almost intolerable in its psychic power, and a
very funny story about a man who, though transformed into a
giant insect, still worries that he might miss his train.

II

What I wish to put together, then, is a group of fictional
works, with Frankenstein at the center, in which the
basic events not only are detached from the everyday concerns of
the reader but also possess a heightened and distorted quality,
especially pronounced because of their lack of causal
sufficiency and by the characters' inability to effect the
consequences they strive for.5 Such events and {228} such works
remind us of the events of our own dream life, our dreams, in
retrospect, often seeming to us both portentous and nonsensical,
terrifying and silly. More particularly, the unity that connects
these literary forms can be found in the last stage of Freud's
(and others') description of the dream process, namely that
waking stage known as "secondary elaboration," in which the
recollection of the dream, which, as it was dreamed, was
necessarily illogical, causally discontinuous, absurd, and
fragmentary, is arranged, made sequential, and fleshed out with
a kind of narrative logic that makes the telling of it tolerable
to the waking, conscious mind.

The classic description of the process of secondary elaboration
occurs in Freud, who quotes Havelock Ellis with amusement and
approval: "'As a matter of fact, we might even imagine the
sleeping consciousness as saying to itself: "Here comes our
master, Waking Consciousness, who attaches such mighty
importance to reason and logic and so forth. Quick! gather
things up, put them in order -- any order will do -- before he
enters to take possession."'"6 The writing of most prose fiction,
of course, is analogous not to the telling of dreams but to the
telling of remembered events from one's conscious past. The much
smaller body of prose fiction (and a significant body of
narrative and lyric poetry) that is analogous to the telling of
dreams carries with it both the compulsiveness and the
indeterminacy of the relating of dreams in experience; the Ancient Mariner is model
both for the compulsiveness of the teller and the oddity of the
rhetoric, for whom is it that one tells one's dreams to? And
what is the appropriate tone?

Literature created out of dream images can either leave the
dream images with much of the absurdity intact or transform them
into "made," "told," fully "elaborated" works, still with some
aspects of the dream work exposed, such as its detachment from
empirical reality and its unabashed symbolism, but with the
illogic and absurdity neutralized. In prose fiction, dream
allegories of the past such as Pilgrim's Progress or
visionary fantasies of the future like H. G. Wells's The Time
Machine are examples of entirely different aesthetic
motives, united only by the common effort to superimpose a
maximum of conscious control on a body of dream-like {229}
images. We could isolate individual passages in either Bunyan's
book or Wells's as legitimately dream-like, but neither work
reads at all like a dream being told. At the other
extreme, Rabelais is full of passages that read rather like
unmediated dream scenes, told with a minimum exercise of the
elaborative mechanisms; and in modern literature the "Nighttown"
episode in Ulysses is the best known and most sustained
example of a passage that allows the primal dream material to
stand, in all of its irrational power.

At some midpoint between these extremes are those forms I am
attempting to describe, in which the secondary elaboration is
incomplete, part of the conscious mediation left undone, some of
the illogic left unrationalized, some of the absurdity left
intact, as if the author, as dreamer, wished to leave the
strangeness of the dream largely unchanged by deliberately
withholding some of the art. The result is a story that risks
seeming ridiculous for the sake of preserving a measure of the
psychic authority of the dream work that gave the initial
impetus to the creation of the work.

Most of Poe's stories obviously had their origins in dream work
or in images comparable to and derivative of dreams. But their
syntax is conventional, the order of events is intelligible,
sufficient gestures are made toward the explanation of motive,
the criteria for inclusion of images and events are implicitly
clear, and Poe's desired effect can be inferred from the
finished story -- which is to say that the fragmentary silliness
and the arbitrary illogic of the primal materials with which Poe
begins are written out in the interests of a unified art story.
"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a bad dream, but the reading of it
conveys not the "feel" of a dream but rather that of waking
experience. Melville's dream (or daydream) of a nihilistic
clerk, on the other hand, allows itself a lesser degree of
secondary elaboration. The result is a narrative which, though
it takes place in the world of business instead of a dark and
solitary room, has much more the "feel" of a dream.

Dreams, to be sure, are dreams and stories, stories. Yet every
literary form "imitates," at some remove, a preliterary mode of
experience. Our view of the conventions of a given work may be
too limited if we take it as being only one of a large and
amorphous class of roughly similar literary works. On the
contrary, our sense of the given work is sharpened if we think
of it in its context of other works that we may agree to call
novels and romance but that, in a narrower sense, adapt to a
highly specific literary purpose {230} some of the impulses and
structures of dream. To link Mary Shelley's book with Kafka's
work does, inadvertently, dignify and make it more apparently
modern, but it also makes its assumptions and conventions more
clear and more aesthetically justifiable.

So Frankenstein, like early Gothic before it, like Kafka after
it, and like a multitude of works of various periods, such as
Melville's Bartleby, makes itself out of dream images
told, but not fully elaborated, into rational and sequential
art. The result is a narrative vehicle which allows a large
measure of self-exposure, terror, pathos, and psychic pain to
coexist with much absurdity, apparent ineptitude, silliness, and
the risk that the whole enterprise will be brushed aside by the
reader as making no claims on his mature scrutiny.

III

Rescued from the ice, Victor Frankenstein consents to tell his
story to Walton. "Prepare to hear of occurrences which are
usually deemed marvellous," he says. "Were we among the tamer
scenes of nature, I might fear to encounter your unbelief,
perhaps your ridicule; but many things will appear possible in
these wild and mysterious regions, which would provoke the
laughter of those unacquainted with the ever-varied powers of
nature" (p. 30). Precisely:
we, of course, are not in the Arctic ice fields when we read
Mary Shelley's book but settled quietly at home. That
Frankenstein's revelations do not provoke laughter from Walton
is due not only to Walton's physical situation, his fervent
seriousness and the consequent seriousness of the style, but
also to his sharing the psychological stress of Frankenstein, a
dreamer condemned to tell his dreams, unable to "elaborate" them
into coherent rationality, knowing that the telling of the
narratives that issue from his wishes and fears will expose him,
try our patience, make himself at times into a low-comic butt
rather than the hero he imagines himself to be.

Even before he encounters Frankenstein Walton is unable to
supply the waking mind's reasons for the dream-like voyage he so
obsessively undertakes. "I shall satiate my ardent curiosity
with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and
may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.
These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to induce me
to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels
when he embarks in a {231} little boat, with his holiday mates,
on an expedition of discovery up his native river" (p. 16). Walton's learning and
his heroic passions coexist with a child-like, prerational
fantasy life; the images of his inner life are unabashedly
untransformed by the conscious mind, leaving him exposed and
unsteady, our response to him uncertain. His greatest anxiety,
on starting out, is that he has no friend, a startling
confession of his human and dream-like image of his own self in
society. Why he has no intimate friend, and what difference it
now makes that he does not, are difficult to explain, which is
to say that the primal imagery once again is only partly
transformed by the logic of the waking narrative. As with
Frankenstein's creation of the Monster, no reader laughs at
Walton's analogy of his voyage with a child's expedition or his
complaint of friendlessness. But, in retrospect, one realizes
how exposed he has left himself, and how absurd, a polar
explorer seen as little boy lost.

Victor's own narration moves quickly into his quest for
knowledge and scientific mastery in a sequence that partakes of
the stucture and tone of the frame comments of Walton. At the
age of thirteen Victor comes across a volume of Cornelius Agrippa, which
fascinates him, although his father pronounces it "sad trash"
(p. 39). Undeterred, he
procures the works of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, which he
reads with delight and enthusiasm. In due course, he leaves for
the university at Ingolstadt, where he seeks out
Professor Krempe, a crabbed and ugly little man, to whom he
discloses his interest in natural philosophy. What has he read?
asks Professor Krempe. It is like a dream and a joke. We wait
for the line. Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, poor Frankenstein
replies. The professor erupts. "'Every minute . . .
every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and
entirely lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded
systems and useless names. Good God! in what desert land have
you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these
fancies, which you have so greedily imbibed, are a thousand
years old, and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected,
in this enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of
Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your
studies entirely anew"' (p.
46).

It is funny and not funny, the poor fool who has given years of
his life to the wrong books. Its analogue in dream life is the
nightmare of all travelers, to be in a country for which one's
phrase book is in the wrong language and all one's well-meaning
attempts at {232} civility only offend the locals because one
has mastered the wrong customs. Nothing in the logic of Mary
Shelley's narrative could have compelled her to imagine ritual
humiliations for Victor Frankenstein in his progress toward
scientific mastery, nothing except the feeling that it was
somehow right to invest his learning both with nightmare
inefficacy and comic failure.

The Monster is created and abandoned. William is murdered;
Justine is tried, convicted, and executed. Victor endures it all
as if entranced, immobilized, guilty of both murders because he
is guilty of having made and abandoned their murderer; he is
obliged, furthermore, to tell it all to us. After a time,
Frankenstein and his Monster are reunited and the Monster begins
his own narration. He describes his "infancy," his solitary
misery, and his first terrifying experience with people. He soon
begins to observe the De Lacey family, from whom he learns their
manners and customs, their wishes and fears, their language and
their very moral sensibilities.

It is an extraordinary posture he assumes, hunched unseen in the
shed near the De Laceys' cottage for some months, rarely
venturing forth, his eye fixed on a chink in the wall of the
cottage. It is, in fact, an act of prolonged voyeurism, in which
the whole of his consciousness is filled with his view of, and
his speculations on, the people who move in and out of that
visual frame. The events within that visual frame have,
necessarily, a hallucinatory aspect. "Through this crevice a
small room was visible, whitewashed and clean, but very bare of
furniture. In one corner, near a small fire sat an old man,
leaning his head on his hands in a disconsolate attitude. The
young girl was occupied in arranging the cottage; but presently
she took something out a drawer, which employed her hands, and
she sat down beside the old man, who, taking up an instrument,
began to play, and to produce sounds sweeter than the voice of
the thrush or the nightingale" (p. 108). Again, the passage
gives a double effect, of psychic intensity in the reading of it
and of faint ridiculousness when it is remembered, the
immobilized inefficacy of the Monster, the suggestion of
perversity in an act of voyeurism extended through an entire
winter, the helplessness of the teller, who must relate his
absurd experience.

Victor's promise to the Monster -- that he make him a mate --
proves impossible for him to keep and he gives up the
enterprise, tearing up the partly assembled limbs, gathering up
the pieces and {233} carrying them away so as not to frighten
the peasants. It is a scene filled with diffuse anxiety and
ritual frustration, comic in retrospect, the retrospective
comedy defusing the anxiety with which the scene is charged.
Then follows a passage as haunting and powerful as any in the
book, in which Victor, swept ashore in Ireland, is greeted with
surliness and hostility, surrounded by a menacing crowd, and led
off to a scowling magistrate, protesting his innocence of some
unnamed crime. The crime of which he is ultimately accused is
the murder of Clerval, whose corpse he agonizedly recognizes.
Ineffectual again, inarticulate, impotent, he sinks into
convulsions and a long delirious fever. He describes his
revival. "But I was doomed to live; and, in two months, found
myself as awaking from a dream, in a prison, stretched out on a
wretched bed, surrounded by gaolers, turnkeys, bolts, and all
the miserable apparatus of a dungeon" (p. 177). This scene powerfully
reminds the modern reader of Kafka and Joseph K. The relation
between The Trial and Frankenstein thus becomes
one of those Eliotesque or Borgesian situations in which a
recent work inadvertently enlarges and complicates our
understanding of a previous work. We cannot now will ourselves
to be innocent of Kafka; and so Frankenstein's guilt must seem
more awesome and mysterious because we can only read through our
experience of Kafka. Furthermore, Frankenstein in that scene
must suggest the additional parallel, that Joseph K., guilty of
nothing yet guilty as charged, moved Kafka to laughter.

As Frankenstein is released from prison and the book works
toward its close, he himself conflates his dreams with his
waking life: "The past appeared to me in the light of a
frightful dream; yet the vessel in which I was, and the wind
that blew me from the detested shores of Ireland, and the sea
which surrounded me, told me too forcibly that I was deceived by
no vision" (p. 183); "during
the day I was sustained and inspirited by the hope of night; for
in sleep I saw my friends, my wife, and my beloved country" (p. 204). Elizabeth is murdered
on their wedding night, and, resolute for the first time since
he created the Monster, Frankenstein swears revenge. He kneels
and calls on the ministers of vengeance to aid him in "my work," an invocation that is
answered by a resounding laughter that seems to be at once the
Monster's reply and a comic reverberation.

No reader of Frankenstein needs to be reminded of how the
end {234} of Victor's narration to Walton becomes a kind of
surrealism before its time. It is the supreme chase scene of the
fiction of the first half of the nineteenth century, acted out
on an Arctic terrain that becomes a lunar landscape, the ice
fields of the mind.

But now, when I appeared almost within grasp of my foe, my hopes
were suddenly extinguished, and I lost all traces of him more
utterly than I had ever done before. A ground sea was heard; the
thunder of its progress, as the waters rolled and swelled
beneath me, became every moment more ominous and terrific. I
pressed on, but in vain. The wind arose; the sea roared; and, as
with the mighty shock of an earthquake, it split, and cracked
with a tremendous and overwhelming sound. The work was soon
finished: in a few minutes a tumultuous sea rolled between me
and my enemy, and I was left drifting on a scattered piece of
ice, that was continually lessening, and thus preparing for me a
hideous death. [Pp. 207-208]

The episode is so terrible because it is so preposterous, the
action gradually speeding forward like a movie projector out of
control, the pursuer become victim, the final humiliation, the
last bad dream, and the last ritual defeat. Adrift on a frozen
sea, Frankenstein is rescued and invited to tell his tale, a
many-sided invitation which asks at one and the same time, What
high mimetic horrors brought you to that frozen sea? and, What
low mimetic ineptitude caused you to be adrift on an ice floe in
the Arctic Ocean?

IV

I suggested earlier that the rhythms of Frankenstein,
especially its stylized alterations of movement and inertia, are
very pertinent to our ambivalent response to the book. Every
artistic effect in Frankenstein bears some relation to
certain primal patterns of imagery and narration. So it is with
the book's rhythms. Those rhythms are, indeed, the central
formal means by which the primal psychological impulses out of
which the novel obviously grew are given fictional
expression.

Passages of stasis in literary works often have the capacity to
move us at some basic psychological level. Although most of our
lives is lived in stasis -- sleeping, eating, reading, sitting
at a desk -- the image of a character immobilized for any period
of time is a disturbing one, haunting, problematic, potentially
comic. The first {235} book of Gulliver's Travels is
rich and intricate, but surely the most affecting moment is the
image of Gulliver immobilized, tied down on the beach. Bartleby,
once again, also serves as an example of the ambivalent and
psychologically potent effects of an immobilized character. It
is a literary possibility carried to its farthest extreme in
Oblomov.

A heightened sense of motion is, in a converse way, equally
capable of evoking a strange and potent psychological response.
A kinship between literary and dream images is obvious. Our most
affecting dreams tend to be dreams of motion. We chase or are
chased. We fall. We enter rooms. We arrive in strange towns. We
swim, drive, fly. As for prose fiction, some of the most
pointless and terrible moments in Candide are those
passages in which the movement accelerates and the characters
move in a kind of unwilling and farcical dance. It is a rhythm
that Conrad was aware of; the storm scenes of his middle period
are often invested with both a farcical excess of human movement
and a horrifying hallucinatory power.

Frankenstein is, in some ways, a remarkably static book.
The reader who expects a continuous and demonic energy will
surely be disappointed by the amount of talk, those
comparatively flat passages, sometimes lasting for many pages,
where the suspense is dissipated and somebody explains. But the
novel also contains some of the most memorable scenes of
movement in all of prose fiction, each conspicuously
dream-like. And those passages of stasis in Frankenstein
are filled with a patterned and highly charged diction of
movement, so that even when the characters are physically at
rest, they often talk as if they were still in motion.

Here, for example, is Victor in motion:

It was completely dark when I arrived in the environs of Geneva;
the gates of the town were already shut; and I was obliged to
pass the night at Secheron, a village at the distance of half a
league from the city. The sky was serene; and, as I was unable
to rest, I resolved to visit the spot where my poor William had
been murdered. As I could not pass through the town, I was
obliged to cross the lake in a boat to arrive at Plainpalais.
During this short voyage I saw the lightnings playing on the
summit of Mont Blanc in the most beautiful figures. The storm
appeared to approach rapidly; and, on landing, I ascended a low
hill, that I might observe its progress. It advanced; the
heavens were clouded, and I soon felt the rain coming slowly in
large drops, but its violence quickly increased. [P. 75]

{236} It is an odd and affecting night scene, the solitary
journey against a background of the gathering storm, as good an
example as any of the dream-telling quality that permeates the
book. But if we contrast this with passages in which no physical
movement occurs, even in such periods of stasis, the verbs, the
metaphors dead and alive, the whole stylistic texture evoke
movement. In the fourth chapter, for example, Frankenstein
begins his studies and describes his path to knowledge, his
rapid progress, his pursuit of discoveries, going as far as
others have gone before him, arriving at a point, being on the
brink, being led to examine, arriving at the summit,
obliterating his steps, finding a passage, leading Walton on,
being borne onwards like a hurricane, pursuing his undertaking,
pursuing nature to her hiding place, being urged forward by a
resistless impulse, and so on.

The Monster, with a totally different stylistic range, also
moves, and we see his account, and others', of his movement.
When he and his creator end their conversation, the Monster
leaves: "I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than
the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost him among the
undulations of the sea of ice" (p. 148). And elsewhere, "I would
have seized him; but he eluded me, and quitted the house with
precipitation. In a few moments I saw him in his boat, which
shot across the waters with an arrowy swiftness, and was soon
lost amidst the waves" (p.
168).

Like his creator, the Monster's diction, when he describes
himself, is full of movement; it characteristically alternates
between tranquillity and action, real or imagined. "All, save I,
were at rest or in enjoyment. I, like the arch-fiend, bore a
hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathised with, wished
to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me,
and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin" (p. 136). Or, a few paragraphs
later, "These thoughts calmed me, and in the afternoon I sank
into a profound sleep; but the fever of my blood did not allow
me to be visited by peaceful dreams. The horrible scene of the
preceding day was for ever acting before my eyes; the females
were flying, and the enraged Felix tearing me from his father's
feet" (p. 137). Basically
gentle but endlessly menaced, betrayed, and provoked, the
Monster moves, in his meditative self-narration, from stasis to
violence.

The Monster, of course, walks, not only from town to town but
{237} through the regions of the earth. Frankenstein not only
walks; he rides, in a chaise, for example, and a cabriolet.
Above all, he rides in boats. The passage in which he approaches
Geneva alone in a boat was
quoted above. Later he describes the period after the conviction
of Justine. "Often, after the rest of the family had retired for
the night, I took the boat, and passed many hours upon the
water. Sometimes, with my sails set, I was carried by the wind;
and sometimes, after rowing into the middle of the lake, I left
the boat to pursue its own course, and gave way to my own
miserable reflections" (p.
91). Frankenstein meets his creature, hears his narration,
and returns to Geneva, where again he passes time in a "little
boat." "At these moments I took refuge in the most perfect
solitude. I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little
boat, watching the clouds, and listening to the rippling of the
waves, silent and listless" (p.
150). A few pages later, he voyages down the Rhine with Clerval, in the same
mood of passive lassitude. He undertakes, then abandons, the
construction of a mate for the Monster, and then moves toward
the scene described earlier as especially Kafkaesque: the
landing on the Irish shore, the accusation of a nonspecific
crime. The transition to that encounter is, again, by a solitary
passage by boat, with the clouds, the sky, the wind, and the
overwhelming passivity. Freed from prison, he leaves Ireland
for Havre-de-Grace. "It was
midnight. I lay on the deck, looking at the stars, and listening
to the dashing of the waves" (p.
183). On the day of his wedding, he and Elizabeth travel --
by boat -- with the same incantatory and obsessive effects: the
wind, the mountains in the background, the waves, the hypnotic
motion of the boat. From that point to the end of the book, the
pursuit is as much by sea as by land; and however purposeful the
pursuit, something of the dream-like quality of passage by ship
is never entirely lost.

What unites all of these modes of action -- the Monster moving
as if flying, Frankenstein pursuing truth by a vast family of
travel metaphors, the monster driven to violence, Frankenstein
carried along in his little boats -- is a common appearance of
automation, both characters acting not out of deliberation and
will but helplessly, out of energies they cannot control.
Victor's characteristic movements in his boats are not
propulsion. He rarely seems to row, or sail; rather, he drifts.
The Monster, portrayed in films as slow and awkward, in the book
moves with superhuman speed, without the {238} appearance of
exertion. Both figures see themselves, and each other, as if
they were figures in a dream. And both act out for us the
archetypal situation of Bergsonian comic theory. They are
automata, mechanized people, puppets, examples, as the operative
phrase is customarily translated from Bergson, of "something
mechanical encrusted on the living."7 The phrase, though perhaps
oversimple, aptly suggests a last comic aspect of Mary Shelley's
serious book.

The characters see themselves at moments of crisis as being
without will, drifting, or impelled. Nothing, to them, could be
more serious than this helplessness. And, as we read, nothing to
us could be more appalling, the figures of both Frankenstein and
his Monster being enormously full of potentiality of mind and
body. Yet as the book recedes in the mind, the images of the two
puppets remain, one of them drifting in a little boat, the other
gliding up and down the Alps, both of them automata yet each
moving at a different rate, like two clocks with pendulums of
different lengths.

The perils of writing about how something happens to be funny
are inescapable; the critical argument collapses for the reader
who cannot agree that the book in question is, in fact, comic.
The professional critics of Frankenstein, over the years,
have treated the book as seriously as Mary Shelley did. But the
common reader has responded to it, at least in the last three
decades, with an uneasy awareness of the capacity of the book to
arouse an extraordinarily wide range of responses, one of which
is amusement. It is a situation that calls for a healthy Johnsonian respect for the
common reader. One might imagine a debate between a century and
a half of solemn professional critical response, on the one
hand, and, on the other, a single "common reader." Our common
reader, let us say, responds to the scene in which
Frankenstein, mortally ill, starved, with only one dog left to
pull him, asks Walton, just before he freezes into that block of
ice, "Before I come aboard your vessel . . . will you
please have the kindness to inform me whither you are bound?" It
is the quintessential scene juxtaposing stasis and motion,
characteristic of the dream-like narration. And it will strike
the common reader, as anyone knows who has taught the book, as
{239} oddly amusing, a reaction that is as honest, as true to
the text, and as deserving of respect as the accumulated
reactions of the critical tradition.

To describe the comic power contained in Frankenstein is
not at all irreverent. There is a tradition within which
Frankenstein unself-consciously stands on its own, a rich
and eclectic mode that remains undisturbed by the coexistence of
mythic seriousness, psychic authority, and laughter.

5. I have assembled works that are not exactly
novels and stories, not exactly romances, not exactly dream
allegories. The fact, in itself, that such works do not fit
established genres has something to do with their power.
Jonathan Culler asks, "Why are our most crucial and tantalizing
experiences of literature located at the interstices of genres,
in this region of non-genre literature?" and then
speculates on the reasons why ("Towards a Theory of Non-Genre
Literature," in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow,
ed. Raymond Federman [Chicago, 1975], pp. 255-62).